


if i know me

by westhouse



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-26
Updated: 2018-11-26
Packaged: 2019-08-29 14:54:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16746133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/westhouse/pseuds/westhouse
Summary: “You’re finally getting what you want,” says Hannibal quietly, when he realises that he is going to die.For @cabwaylingo.





	if i know me

**Author's Note:**

> haven't seen s3 so inconsistencies are probably present. exists in the void outside the plot. sorry for purpleness. x

“You’re finally getting what you want,” says Hannibal quietly, when he realises that he is going to die.

The intricacies of the thing are difficult to navigate—it’s true he partially says it to hurt Will, true he doesn’t want to do that at all and that he feels immediately sick for having said it. There’s something to be said for him... the way he will do these things, lean hard like a veering ship into the wave of intimacy he craves and then lash out when it gets near like an animal. Can he tell Will Graham that fear rules him? Turns him inside out? Can he ask Will Graham to observe him that way and clear away the brutality, scrub him pink and clean—ask him to do so with his tongue like a wild beast?

Will watches him with these serious and calm eyes, the way he so often does, and it calms him to see despite it all. Still, he is too far away and simultaneously altogether too close where he stands across the room. Hannibal craves the room to breathe that he has, but then breathing has become increasingly difficult. He believes his lungs must be filling with blood, and is unsure if he should be able to feel it yet certain he does. There’s something disappointing in the symbolism. His chest grows heavy and soaked with blood, but not his heart. Perhaps that is the problem. Will can stand there and remain untouched save for a bloody lip. So, his heart remains beating and dry as a heart could ever be.

Over his own shallow breathing, which is steady enough for its trouble, he hears Will’s—steadier still and holy. He turns himself over like Lucifer and claws his way out of the depths of Hell, across the room, to approach Hannibal. “You think this is what I want,” Will says quietly, his cadence nearly a question yet falling short.  _ You know what I think, _ Hannibal says with his eyes, and there is recognition in Will’s. He’s still not close enough, a few feet away and stock-still in the center of the room. He has already taken in the wounds and the blood-soaked sweater, the way Hannibal looks now himself like a wounded deer, torn open as if on the side of the road. The culprit did not stop to put him out of his misery. He was not awarded the white shotgun of mercy. Having seen it and understood it, he only looks Hannibal in the eye. He’s beautiful right now, Hannibal thinks.  _ Gorgeous. _

Yet the distance rankles. With great pain Hannibal forces himself to sit up, pushing the floor away and positioning himself against the side of the armchair he’s sitting next to. To his own surprise this sound escapes from him, a pain-noise, preylike in its cadence and wholly unwelcome here. It makes him feel staticy, unwell. When he draws in the next breath, he uses it to say, “This isn’t a trick, Will,” uses it to caress the sound of Will’s name as ardently as he can, not like birdsong but like a flatline. Loving in the sense of safety, of endings, of goodnight. 

It feels like an eternity before Will comes closer to him. It is a slow process. He is careful and cautious like his dogs, moving now like the stray who has finally come to trust Hannibal for the first time—he must, Hannibal sees it, and that breaks his heart. It knocks the breath out of him and he shakes into the vague darkness of the room while Will kneels down beside him and reaches under his sweater to touch the long open gash. “No,” he confirms, unflinching as he digs his fingers in and Hannibal grits his teeth and forces back a whine, “no, it isn’t.”

After Hannibal collects himself a second later they sit like that in silence for a minute. He closes his eyes while Will’s fingers trace the outline of the wound and then begin to find the other places he is hurt. He presses at the broken ribs and the shattered collarbone, not intending to hurt but instead probing, exploring, autopsying before the death has happened. It hurts anyway; the pain is transformed at his fingertips into pleasure, the way prayer evokes hope out of hopelessness. And the truth slips out through the open wounds, through Hannibal’s failures to keep in the occasional hiss or whimper that comes out of him when it is too much. When Will is done, his hand is bloody. He doesn’t wipe it on the side of the armchair as much as he leans against the armchair, sighing wearily like Atlas. And he is—perhaps he does hold up the sky, Hannibal considers, seeing the haze past his shoulders, the heaviest clouds. Where will they go when he is gone?

“You’re dying,” Will tells him, and Hannibal breathes out in divine relief until that relief becomes a laugh. He laughs weakly but honestly, his eyes filling with tears. His laughter upsets Will for a second, something he can understand and see clearly, so he stops and grabs his bloodied hand, still smiling. This breaks the barrier between them.

He grimaces as Will drags him closer and inward, positioning himself too against the armchair and failing to position him in a way that doesn’t hurt. He doesn’t mind it, seeing as the sensation is fading now from parts of him. It’s his hands he doesn’t want to lose, his grip tightening on Will like he is a cliffside. Begging not to fall off. Not yet. He rasps, “Yes,” and nothing more as pain shoots through him at the statement. He feels Will nod and then his clean hand finds purchase in his hair, strokes it like he is a beloved thing. 

Hannibal feels the tears spill over and shame in that, though it’s dull and distant like a headache. The kindness is the thing that would make him break, of course. There isn’t time to regret it. The world, he has known to be a cruel and unforgiving place—and then he has hoped for Will Graham to be cruel and unforgiving, quietly begged him for it, but now he is kind. He is always kind at the end of all things.

He is unclear on how long they remain there, how long Will holds him as he bleeds and his breathing takes more and more effort. In the first hour Hannibal whispers to him. “I love you,” is what he says, and he should follow it with  _ but you know that _ but he doesn’t. Suddenly the pretense between them has become muddy. What Will says is, “I have nothing to say.”

Hannibal meditates for a long time on the feeling of Will’s fingers in his hair, smoothing over it and at times pressing in to gently work through light tangles. The other arm is snaked around him tightly, warm bloodied fingers pressed against his bare stomach under his sweater. The feeling is pleasantly grounding and he feels it hold him to this world longer than he may have otherwise, allowing him to cling to things... the smell of Will pressed up against him, the heat of his body, his heartbeat metronomic. There is a time he finds the strength to tilt his head up and catch Will’s palm against his own skin, kissing it when the chance arises. Certain things are to be afforded to the dying.

When he coughs and wheezes, when he shakes, Will only pulls him closer. He buries his nose in his hair and rubs his back, hushing him with a tenderness impossible to understand.

They have said hearing is the last sense to go. Hannibal does not know if he believes this, thinks he might be able to shut off each sense on its own, intentionally. It is a superstitious thing to be determined of, but again  _ certain things, _ and more than that it eventually withers down to this: the last thing Hannibal Lecter hears is Will Graham’s quiet, even-toned voice, murmuring, “I assume you know you were loved,” and repeating, “you were loved,” until the lights go out.


End file.
